I found this rather choice dog shit sign on Clay Street last week. For those of you who are not proficient in Spanish, “Poopi no mas” roughly translates as “Poop no more” in English.

This would be a damned good band name. Too bad I have almost no musical ability whatsoever or I’d start a band and christen it “Poop No More”.

Otherwise, what started as a modest 4-5 slide PowerPoint presentation outlining my findings from September 20, 2006 has mushroomed into 13 slide magnum opus as of writing this post. It is quite an extraordinary piece of work. I hope to have it up this evening or tomorrow at the very latest.

Last week I saw a piece of dog shit and it has been troubling me ever since. It looked familiar, but I could not for the life of me figure out why. This morning after three cups of coffee and five minutes of Googling, this mystery got solved.

In case you are wondering, the above still is from the movie “Mothra”. Before he (?) became the moth we have grown to know and love, he was a larva. That is what you are seeing in this picture: baby Mothra.

I do not know what disturbs me more, the simple fact that I have this knowledge or that it was not acquired after smoking large amounts of grass. I was in total control of my faculties when I viewed this movie (unlike damned near everyone else I know).

Those of you who reside in or around my ‘hood have probably noticed the recent proliferation of procreation lately. If you do not believe me, go to The Garden (our local grocery store) on any given Saturday or Sunday morning and negotiate the gridlock of SUV-sized baby strollers yourself. It is more than a little annoying.

I do not have anything against babies. While waiting to check out from the grocery store I actually enjoy watching little Timmy suck on a ring pop and then proceed to shove it all the way up his nose. This not only makes the time go by faster, but it gives me the kind of cheap thrill that makes my life bearable. (Both of the the previous points are probably one and the same, but I digress…)

Parents are usually the ones who piss me off. A number of my friends have recently become or will soon be parents. I’m happy for them; they are cool people and will undoubtedly raise cool kids. The world needs good kids raised by parents who love them. On the other hand, the world does not need sappy birth announcements like the one that blighted my mailbox last week:

Our hearts whispered
your name and God answered…
At one glance we loved you
with a thousand hearts…

Unless the information I received in my sex education class was incorrect, I fail to see what god has to do with such things. It is my understanding that child-bearing is a simple matter of biology, not invoking some cosmic hotline for help. If you canâ€™t figure it out on your own, you probably shouldnâ€™t have children in the first place. Simple as that.

Then again, maybe contacting â€œhimâ€ has become an automated/consolidated process like dialing 311. Not only will a courteous operator handle your inquiry, but a licensed expert from Jesusâ€™ Insemination Services Made Manifest (J.I.S.M.M.) will be dispatched to your home where he, turkey-baster/plunger in hand, will help you achieve your reproductive dream. Be sure to demand I.D. from your case-worker, as there are a number of imposters afoot.

The repetitive mention of â€œheartsâ€ strikes me as being downright creepy. Having a fair amount of pre-Colonial Latin American history under my belt, the phrase â€œwe loved you with a thousand heartsâ€ paints a particularly gruesome picture in my mind. Presuming that each parent has one heart, where did the other 998 come from? Your guess is as good as mine.

In closing, Iâ€™d like to make the following suggestions to soon-to-be parents:

Your childless friends (BTW— we prefer the term child-free) are happy for you.

We wish you the very best and look forward to being a part of your childâ€™s life, butâ€¦

please leave god and hyperbole out of it. Most of the worldâ€™s problems nowadays are firmly grounded in god and hyperbole; there is no need to add fuel to the fire, so to speak.

Having children is a biological function. It is about as mundane as taking a shit: both happen every day, all over the world, in numbers that would stagger the imagination. I will refrain from describing my bowel movements as an act of god (and believe you me, my affection for hot food often renders by-products culled straight out of the Old Testament) if you will be so kind as to return the favor in kind.

Otherwise, I will have not other recourse than to reply to your birth announcements with this.

Here are two recently-completed pieces that I wish to share. I hope you enjoy them as much I as I do.

The FEMA Clock

The body of this clock is made from a pencil case I bought from a local 99 cent store before Hurricane Katrina. I thought it was pretty funny at the time of purchase, but I get a real rip out of it now. The penguin playing guitar is a nice touch.

I am toying around with the idea of placing this item for sale on Ebay just to see what will happen. It’s been my observation that many users of Ebay tend to be right-leaning, so I imagine it would not be received very well.

The American Express Lamp

I have been collecting those fake credit cards that come in junk mail for at least three years now. With some help from my friends, I have amassed around 100 of them as of this post. To date I have used them to spice up the chandelier in the living room, but I elected to pull a few ‘cards’ to make this nifty lamp shade.

Otherwise, I have one cool new development to announce: Jack E. Jett has shown interest in featuring some of my dog shit infotainment on his show. I suspect this weekend will be spent prepping stuff to this end and knocking out a PowerPoint presentation of my latest dog shit findings for all to enjoy.

I found today’s Dung of the Day while poking around my old nabe (far north Greenpoint). Although I found a bounty of prodigiously large canine bowel movements, I felt this little guy had a certain je nais se quois worth sharing.

I just took out the trash. As I was completing this task I noticed that my shoes were sticking to the floor. This is because someone has seen fit to vomit in our foyer, up the stairwell and outside our front door. This person was even thoughtful enough to leave their used puke rags for me to savor and cherish.

Miss Heather

P.S.: If you are wondering, I still do not have a working telephone. It is 11:00 a.m.

Just when I think things can’t get any more shitty around here at “Half-assed Junction”, the universe throws a couple more turds my direction.

Among the numerous items on my agenda for today, I get to wait for Verizon to repair our telephone. We have not had phone service since Sunday. I spent all day yesterday waiting for Verizon, to no avail. I suspect the work the MTA was doing yesterday (READ: a 8+ story tall crane occupying our street), has something to do with the phone company not showing up.

I am not necessarily angry about having an inoperative landline: I have worked enough Reception desks to harbor a dark hatred of telephones and most of the people who use them. Rather, I am getting very tired of this full-scale assault against the peaceful sanctity of my home. As I write this (at 9:00 a.m.):

I have been awakened at 7:00 a.m. by Clarence the Tom Cat making his morning visit. This worked our cats into such a frenzy my husband had to intervene before they beat the living shit out of each other.

The construction crew out front fired up their machinery at 7:30 a.m.

The landlord started work on his new roof behind us at 8:30 a.m. Hopefully the Department of Buildings will pay him a visit today. God only knows I have waited long enough for this to happen: OVER A WEEK.

If I have managed to achieve anything during the 30-odd years I have been in this mortal coil, it is the cultivation of anger management skills. I was quite the ball of piss and vinegar in my teens and twenties; I am still as angry (if not more so) now, but I channel it in a more constructive fashion. This newly-developed ability of mine is being pushed to the absolute limit right now. The recent revelation that our landlord is refusing to accept rent checks from one of our neighbors isn’t helping much.

Over the last month or so I have noticed that the garbage in our building is not being handled like it used to be. Instead of being sorted and bagged on a regular basis, now it piles up into an uncontrollable heap. When this matter is (finally) bagged, all the contents (recycling and household waste alike) are being thrown together.

The is happening because the landlord is no longer allowing our neighbor (a section-8 tenant whose husband is very ill) to work as a porter in our building in exchange for a nominal reduction in rent. Her rent checks are not being accepted either. Apparently this has been going on for two months, but we only got wind of it last night. I am not certain what else is going on (with our nabe), but I imagine it can’t be good.

While I cannot offer many details as to what is happening (with this neighbor), I can give a compelling reason as to why it is happening: our landlord recently refinanced the mortgage on this building. One of the stipulations of this mortgage is that the rent collected from this building goes against the balance (of said mortgage). If an apartment turns over, he can raise the rent*; if he raises the rent, it means more money to throw against the mortgage payment. I wonder how many of the other long-term residents of this building he is doing this to— or if my husband and I will be next?

The landlord next door has done no new ‘renovation’ work the last two days (that I know of anyway). Had he done so, I bet he’d get really pissed about what happened to his roof. Literally.

Clarence the Tom Cat has seen fit to ‘spray’ copiously upon his (new) plywood domain (much to our cats’ displeasure) and the neighbors next door have reverted back to throwing food/garbage out their window. The landlord can gentrify the building, but he can’t gentrify the residents contained therein. The Crapstravaganza continues!